It(‘)s nothing new

Lest anyone think that it’s only since the invention of texting or the Internet that people confuse it’s and its, I just wanted to offer some evidence that it’s not. It comes in the form of an old TV idiom, the spinning newspaper:

This mistake graces the first few seconds of the music video for John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song”, which I hadn’t heard before last week but now have become completely infatuated with. The spinning newspaper editor, no doubt a bit addled from typesetting on a rotating headline, put in an apostrophe that doesn’t belong, using it’s when its is called for! (It’s also arguable that there ought to be an apostrophe after the s in workers, but I don’t find that strictly necessary because Mine Workers Strike could be a complex compound noun in the context of a headline.)

Here we’ve got an example of the its-it’s mistake from 1984, when the Internet was still ARPANET, and texting and instant messaging were unheard of, so it seems unfair to blame the modern state of it(‘)s confusion simply on the profusion of quick electronic communication. But, you might argue, weren’t there beepers and pagers around then? Couldn’t they, as stepping-stones toward full-blown texting, have laid the seeds of apostrophal destruction that are now bearing fruit? I don’t know, because Wikipedia didn’t make it obvious to me when the first pager became available in the commercial market, and information that’s not in Wikipedia isn’t really worth knowing. Maybe John Mellencamp’s 1984 newspaper gaffe was already due to the insidious influence of digital communication. But turns out that it actually goes even farther back, to the very inception of possessive its in the sixteenth century.

Of course, no one should be surprised that its-it’s confusion should predate modern speedy communication. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, it(‘)s first appeared in the sixteenth century as the combination of it and the genitive case marker ‘s, and it was “at first commonly written it’s“. According to the OED, this spelling died out in the early nineteenth century, although Google Books reveals that attestations of possessiveit’s continue from that point through to the modern day, albeit less commonly than in its heady early days. Somewhere along the line, possessive it’s began to be regarded as the dispreferred form, and then later the grammatically incorrect form.

[Drifting off-topic, I loved the old archetypes that the kid adopts in the video: the miner with the head-mounted lamp, the butcher with the traditional apron/bowtie combo, the farmer dressed in flannel and overalls. They reminded me of the noble images of the workingman that I was raised with, the images I had as a child of millhunks and Rosie the Riveters, who worked in mines and mills and factories and returned home grimy and greasy and scarred. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’m part of the last generation for whom these images aren’t terribly outdated. Or perhaps they’re out of date even within my generation; when I mentioned this idea to my girlfriend, she was surprised to learn that there were still operating mines in the U.S. Has a new modern image of the little guy displaced these old archetypes? Or have we lost a part of our collective soul with nothing to fill its void? And if I’m this nostalgic now, what will happen when I actually reach an age when nostalgia is justifiable?]

Summary: Don’t be too surprised that people use it’s when they ought to use its. it’s used to be the correct form, and it never completely died out, even after its became the grammatically correct choice for possession.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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6 comments

Anyone who thinks that orthographic standards have slipped should read a few personal letters or journal entries from the 1800s. People were terrible spellers back then. Punctuation was sporadic and capitalization seemed pretty arbitrary. The average person’s writing skills have improved dramatically in the last century or two.

It’s a prop specifically made for a music video! Dashed out by a studio or production assistant who probably dropped out of high school to follow his/her favorite rock band but ended up shlepping coffee to roadies. Not to be considered serious evidence for anyone’s thesis short of impressionable grad students.

Lemony Snicket has a wonderfully simple tip to follow: if you can substitute ‘it’s’ with ‘it is’ then apostrophe should be used, if not, then it should be ‘its’. That’s how my family trained ourselves while listening in the car to A Series of Unfortunate Events.

For archetypes, I thought you’d mention Norman Rockwell, so wonderfull.

If Couples were referring to the individual couples in the movie, then yeah it should probably have an apostrophe. But if it’s just a general descriptive adjective, I think it’s OK. Like: “What kind of retreat is it?” “Why, it’s a couples retreat.”

In addition to being a command, it could also indicate that this is a film in which couples retreat from something. The sophistication of wordplay and ambiguity is positively Joycean.